Surround Sight Gigapixel Panoramic Photography

Custom Fine-Art Prints

About the Photographer

All of the images you see here at Surround Sight were created by me, Mike Storey. While I have always had an interest in photography, I never really pursued it with any vigor until 2009. After moving to Asheville NC, I was frustrated with the narrow field of view that my camera gave me, and so I began shooting multiple pictures and using the computer to stitch them together. It's been a few years since that first stitch job, and I've learned a few things. It might also be worth noting that I am red-green color blind. I work to make my prints look like what I see, but can we ever be sure other people see the same thing we do? In the end what we each see in any picture is a truly unique experience. I hope you enjoy my work, don't forget to take a look at the shop and pick up something for your walls at home, or your phone or computer.

Process

People are sometimes surprised to find out the amount of work that goes into my artwork. From finding a location to shoot from, to framing a canvas print will typically be 60-80 person hours, and as much as 1,000 computer hours of processing. If your interested in some of the details you can follow blog posts here.

WHAT IS GIGAPIXEL PHOTOGRAPHY

Basically, a gigapixel photograph is just a picture with more than 1,000 Megapixels. Your phone is probably somewhere around 8 Megapixels, and a good DSLR is 30Mp+. You may have seen advertisements for the Nokia 43Mp camera phone, and DARPA, NASA and Duke University are all currently deploying 1Gp+ cameras. While there are several ways to create Gigapixel images, my work is all done by compositing a set of pictures together into a larger image. I use a Giga-Pan Epic Pro robot that controls shooting. I started with a Cannon T1i camera, and all the pictures on this site that were shot before 2013 were done with that camera. I have since upgraded to a Nikon D800. Most of the work you see here was stitched using AutoPano-Giga, with post production manual HDR work done in Photoshop. Final processing to post to the web is done in PanoTour-Pro. In the final step of uploading to the web I also use some home-made tools to tune the files generated by PanoTour-Pro to support embedding of the tours in FaceBook and my custom "Guided Tours".

Some of my panorama pages will provide some basic information about the picture. Rows, Columns and Brackets will be the number of original pictures that were taken. Bracketing is performed by the camera, which takes multiple pictures [or brackets] at varying exposures at each location. This allows me to deal with the wide variations in lighting that will exist across a panoramic view. Additionally I usually indicate the final stitched size of the panoramic. I'm very guilty of just using the first and largest size here, the actual crops used for printing are often much smaller, and usually scaled down to less than 20% for printing.

Education

My father taught me the basics of dark-room work when I was in Jr. high, and I continued to do black and white work out of a dark room under the stairs of my apartment in college. I was distracted from my pursuit of a photograph passion by a thirty year career in computer science. All of my photography work is self-taught, and most of my processes are highly technical and fairly unique.